Chapter 6
June, Now
Behind Liam, the stage glows pink as a new song starts to play. The light haloes his head and paints my skin, but I’m flushed head to toe as it is, so the effect is basically negligible.
Now that I’m firmly grounded, Liam’s hands move off me. He takes a measured step backward, giving me space.
“You came to find me at work, after four years of radio silence, and risked getting kicked out by security, because you need me to break your heart?” His voice is almost deadpan.
“That’s the gist of it,” I say.
His eyes are scanning me head to toe, as if reminding himself what I look like in the flesh. I’m on social media but only in the barest sense of the word, and it could very well be the case that Liam does need reminding. “Does this have to do with your music?” he asks.
I nod but say nothing more. Even after all this time, he knows me too well.
Liam’s mouth flattens as his eyes search mine.
Is he also thinking about the last time we talked? About the specific how and why everything imploded? I can admit the irony of it is poetic, stacked up against the how and why I’m running for him now.
“Come with me.” Liam grabs my hand, leads me through the sparser crowd of VIP guests.
Now that we’ve made initial contact, my brain is screaming that I’ve made a grave mistake.
Liam was a lifeblood for me; he made me feel more like myself.
But when things ended, I had to quite literally scrape my body off the floor and figure out how not to lose that version of me without him.
To keep her through the absence of him—which was like healing pneumonia with nothing but an old English tincture.
Why would I do that to myself again?
Then I look past his shoulder to the stage—the instruments, the speakers, the sound waves—and out to the crowd.
Thousands of people belting the lyrics to a song that came out fifteen years ago but will outlive the people who made it.
I remind myself what it’s like to be at a live show for an artist I love, performers giving their whole hearts to strangers each weekend because they can’t not, because it’s who they are.
That’s why, I tell myself. Because music is what makes you feel human.
It is pretty much the only thing that’s ever made me feel corporeally human.
In silence, I have a phantom limb. When I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, I was first drawn to songwriting in quiet hours, when the rooms around me started to feel like a still life painting.
I craved the noise of my sisters fighting, their music, the TV, our dog barking, the squeak of my dad’s boots on the hallway floor.
Liam pulls me through the crowd to the front of another fence line, this one bumping up against the stage. He moves behind me, sets one hand on my shoulder, and stretches his other arm past me so he can point at the back corner of the stage.
“You see that ramp?” he says near my ear.
“Yes.”
“I’m going up there because I have to manage the stage reset between performers. You might lose sight of me as I move around backstage, but that’s where I’m going to be, okay?”
I nod, and Liam’s warm breath grazes the side of my face. “There are only two more acts, maybe one hour of playing, and then I have to make sure everything’s squared away for tomorrow. It’ll take another thirty minutes, probably.”
“I’ll wait.”
“Will you? Do you promise?”
I turn to face him and catch the worried lines between his brows, the chiseled horizontal question mark of his lips.
“I’ll wait for you, Liam.”
He doesn’t look convinced. “Still angry at me?”
“Only because I’m stubborn.” It’s completely true and feels amazing to say out loud. “But I’m not done fighting with you.”
He offers me a desultory smirk and nods at the security guard, who opens the gate for him. Liam gives me one last curious glance before he disappears up the ramp and out of sight.
After Eric Church leaves the stage, Luke Combs plays and then Tim McGraw closes the show.
I hum along, detaching myself from my current reality.
I’ve always been able to do that with music.
It suspends time, delineates it. But when the concert ends and fans begin their mass exodus, my nerves settle in again, like cloud particles gathering moisture before a storm.
“You are waiting here for Bishop?” the guard asks me. He, too, is Russian.
“Yes, if that’s okay.”
“You can wait in the lounge.” The guard cocks his head at me, then opens the gate and points to the breezeway in the corner that leads to the football locker rooms.
“I don’t mind waiting here.”
“It will start raining in thirty seconds,” the guard says. He continues to stare at me.
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
I wait him out, counting in my head.
It starts to rain.
“Thirty-six seconds,” he amends.
The sky breaks open. I rush through the gate and down the cleared corridor with a herd of others.
Music agents and executives, event staff, photographers.
I grab a water bottle from a table of snacks when I make it into the converted lounge and sit in the corner, waiting for Liam.
As more people file in I twiddle on my phone for a while, trying to keep my mind blank and my thoughts from overwriting my instincts.
“Paige?”
I glance up and see Misha Mohan. She was a couple years ahead of me at Belmont. We’re the same age and became quasi friends before she graduated.
The quasi part meaning: we only hung out in group settings at open mics.
“Hey!” I say, happy to see her. I reach over for a hug. Misha is tucked between two tattooed men on a couch beside my lone chair. To hug her, I have to encroach on all three of them, but the guys just smile politely at me.
“Did you play keyboard today?” I ask her. It was what Misha always said she wanted to pursue after graduation.
She nods. “The earlier acts. What are you doing here?”
“Do you know Liam Bishop?” Saying his name aloud is an electric discharge.
Misha’s face brightens. “Everybody around here knows Liam. He’s like, the first mate.”
Funny. That’s also how one of his teammates described him back when Liam was the pitcher, and the team captain.
“We knew each other from Knoxville,” I explain, sitting back down. “Just catching up.”
“Before he hits the road?” Misha asks.
I frown. “The road?”
“Yeah. We’re all going on tour with Penelope Parker for the summer.”
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
He’s leaving town. He’s not even going to be here.
The sound of squelching, jerky footsteps pulls our attention to the front of the lounge, where he emerges, rain speckled and panting.
I get a flash of him looking just like this the day we met, covered in raindrops and (though I didn’t know it at the time) looking for me.
When his eyes find mine, Liam exhales, hands on his knees.
“Dammit, Paige.”
“Sorry!” I say, genuinely apologetic to have alarmed him. “It was raining.”
He pulls himself back up, face softening as he walks toward me. “I know, I know. You just scared me.” When he reaches me, he grabs the water bottle out of my hands, unscrews it, and polishes the rest off.
“You good, Bishop?” asks one of the tattooed guys sitting with Misha.
Liam offers him a thumbs-up as he swallows. He turns to me. “You ready?”
“For what?”
His eyes flash. “Late-night tacos and an explanation?”
“Tacos, yes. Explanation, only if you’re lucky.” My cheekiness is forced, and it shows.
“I’m feeling lucky,” Liam mutters back. “My car’s here. I’ll drive us.”
“Good, because I electric scootered.”
“Paige, maybe I’ll see you around again?” Misha leans forward, her eyes flitting back and forth between Liam and me.
“Maybe!” I offer her a tepid smile.
Liam and I walk in bated silence through the bowels of the stadium and out to the nearest parking lot, where his same old Chevy truck is parked.
“You still drive that thing!” It was meant to be a question but sounds nothing like one.
“Until it gives up,” Liam murmurs, his smile tentative. “Remember?”
I remember everything.
Immediately my brain flashes to the last time we were in it together—which was also the last time, in his truck bed, on a duvet, under the East Tennessee stars.
“I just thought it would’ve given up by now.”
Climbing into the passenger side has me leafing through even more memories. I think of the first time he picked me up in this truck from the apartment I shared with Zara.
Every time after.
I’m losing focus, and fast. My emotions are seesawing between years-old frustration and giddy warmth at his nearness.
“Misha said you’re going on tour?”
“Next week,” he says, strapping in.
In closed quarters, the awkwardness between us is stiflingly tight.
Liam starts the truck, pulls out of the lot.
“Do you like your job?” I blurt.
He slants me a look, like he finds my ice breaking more painful than the alternative. “I do. The schedule is insane, and the chaos of live shows drives me crazy every now and then. But I get to be around great music all the time.”
“You seem happy. I mean, from what I can tell on social media, which I guess is actually the worst barometer.” I’m rambling.
He neither confirms nor denies and asks, “Are you? Happy?”
My swallow is thick. “Yeah. I’ve been good.”
“That’s great, Paige. I’m really glad.”
We lapse into silence again.
I glance at the floor, spot an old CD with familiar handwriting.
Paige’s Songs
“What the fuck?” I scoop up the CD and hold it in front of him. “Did you burn this from the voice memos I sent you?”
His eyes flick to the CD, back to the road. “I wanted them all in one place, so I could hear them like an album.”
A switch flips, and now I’m seething. This is a perfect symptom of the same problem we never resolved. I set the CD on the floor with the rest of his collection—his old car doesn’t take an aux cord—and stare moodily out the window.